Source: Tom's Guide US | Keywords: security, firewall | Themes: The Internet, Networking, Laptops and Notebooks
- 1. The Urge to Miniaturize Networking Appliances is Pervasive
- 2. Yoggie Pico to the Rescue!
- 3. Yoggie Pico Security Components, Fit and Finish
- 4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
- 5. Testing the Yoggie Pico Pro
4. Installing and Using the Yoggie Pico
The Pico’s documentation (a full-color quick installation fold-out guide, an installation CD and miscellaneous notices) is clean and well-executed-there’s no sense of corner-cutting there. The quick installation guide is stamped “Plug and Forget,” which is a little disconcerting to any practicing security professional but conveys its point well-you really can take your mind off this device and let it handle its own business.
A first-time use notice states that with the installation comes an automatic download of any and all relevant product updates. The process can take up to 15 minutes during which time the product is unusable. Although we personally did not encounter such a lengthy process, actual usage scenarios demonstrated that interruptions can also occur during regular hourly updates throughout the lifetime of the Pico Pro. There were points at which our casual surfing was interrupted by an update, leaving media-rich content pages suffering most visibly in the interim until the update completed (which seldom took more than 60 seconds to complete).
One issue did arise during installation on a Windows Vista desktop-for an unknown and unspecified reason, the installation media couldn’t be recognized as valid data (our machine kept asking to insert a CD or DVD). There was no problem using the same disk in our Windows XP notebook. Our simple solution is the next best thing: obtain an executable installer from the manufacturer’s Website. About a minute and some 6.8 MB later, the installer was downloaded and activated on our Vista machine. Setup was also a breeze, with standard Install Wizard-style prompts throughout its short-lived execution.
Upon activation, a notification dialog indicates that the Yoggie Pico Pro is now serving up secured connectivity. Around that same time, it also displayed an error message indicating when surfing the Web that the Yoggie security certificate was invalid for the site we chose. Our test machine was trying to reach http://yoggie.yoggie.com:8443, but was instead redirected to 172.16.0.1, which was the default address assigned to the Pico Pro. This message was quickly dismissed, after which we were able to configure and utilize the Pico Pro without further problems.
Initial setup is standard fare that includes: default language preference; a EULA agreement; and your name, e-mail and license key. Then the Yoggie Pico Pro begins the process of gathering security-related information to improve the quality of its products and services, which you can opt-out of sharing with Yoggie. We chose not to and skipped to the next screen, which prompted us to designate an alternate password-the default is, not surprisingly, “yoggie”-and time zone. We do recommend at least changing the administrative password (note: this is a separate password than what is used to activate and deactivate Yoggie on the task bar); there are network-accessible devices out there already serving default passwords, why go and give yours away?
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Nice, although running an OS that's actually secure (i.e. not windows) would certainly give you most of the same benefits...
Right... because OSX, all the Linux Distros, and BSD all come out of the box preconfigured with up to date antivirus, anti-spyware, traffic shaping, intrusion detection, and content filtering.
Or wait... maybe you're just saying that those OSes are all completely secure and don't need anything else... riiiiiight.
seems like a neat device, did you do any surfing to nether regions of the internet to see what kind of infections it could actally block?
That bit published by Google that malware can install just by visting a site is rather disturbing. Downloading and running a malware program is one thing, but just clicking on a link and getting infected should be blocked by a device like this. Does the pico block such attackS?
Or do I need to maintain my clean and dirty setups. One setup is only for known good sites or offline activity and it is unplugged while the dirty setup is online. Normally the dirty setup is clean, but the anti-virus software has been eaten before.
I purchased 2 of the Pico's (from Yoggie.com) which arrived yesterday. I bought it through their website because they have a promo right now where you get a 3 year license included in the purchase price. The setup and install went just like the review states - perfectly. Not a single problem and it went very quickly (I didn't get the certificate error like the reviewer).
My laptop performance after the install is way beyond what I had expected. Before installing the Pico, opening an Excel spreadsheet from a LAN drive took over 1 minute (with Norton 360 installed). After the Pico install and uninstall of Norton, opening the same Excel document took less than 5 seconds!!! Another performance boost that I noticed was when I wake up my laptop (after about 30 min of inactivity) - it used to take a long time to fully wake up to the point where it was usable again (at lease a min or more - depending on how long it was inactive), where it is virtually instantaneous now.
I've been raving about this little device all day. So far, it ranks among my top 2 gadget purchases ever (right along side my Harmony Remote).
I highly recommend it.
I would be interested in finding out of two computers on the same switch are effected by the USB device. Sometimes I transfer documents between computers on the same network and I would think USB speeds are a lot slower than the Gigabit network interface cards.
I have been using the SOHO Gatekeeper Pro for about 4 months. As an idea it sounds great. Funtionally it is not a practical enterprise solution. For example : whenever the AV database gets updated it slows any function to a crowl. In several instances it just slows browsing, email without even showing that Yoggie's CPU is busy.
Support is horrible. They provide fixes that are broken, in other word no fix. Then they fix the second problem and the support replies that we fixed the issue. While the initial issue is still there.
Additionally, when the automatic update from version 1.3.9 to 1.4.0 they broke the email POP checking and they do not want to fix the issue.
My final thoughts are that it is an unstrustworthy imature security company with bad business practices. Their moto must be "We can break your Yoggie any time we like and we will not support you or fix the issue".
My recomendation is do not buy any equipment from them.
Sorry, but I agree with the previous poster. Access to the internet was very slow after using this devices. Also, the screen snapshots show that the device was NEVER tested against any virus or malware. It's a cumulative graph that can't be refreshed, and they showed ZERO attacks. The device also does not allow any initial secured authentication such as initial logins for things like Yahoo, Gmail,Gdocs, etc with having to be disabled. It must try to block redirected HTTPS authentication. Netflix, wireless printing also do not work. And the "automatic" firmware upgrade to 1.4.0 from 1.3.9 took 50 emails back and forth to tech support to fix. Once it was complete, if fixed none of the above issues.
I bought the Yoggie because it promised to speed up my computer by allowing me to remove Norton which made my pc slow. It actually made surfing the internet slower and receiving emails took for ever.
updates made it worse.